Billy, also jailed early in his career, makes an inside connection with Frankie Fraser (Roland Manookian, mimicking Udo Kier’s look as Dracula) and writes a fan letter to Comer to get in with his gang when he gets out. His biggest coup is stealing an unimaginable wealth of ration coupons. The rise and fall pattern follows inevitably, as played out in rackets all over the world and gangland dramas from the first Scarface onwards … when Mulley steps aside, Comer becomes ‘King of the Underworld’, getting early prison relase to go in the army then out of the forces by feigning (or actually) being mad (ie: too uncontrollably violent to fight), and master of the blitz-era fiddle. The film begins in the 1930s, with the Jewish Comer rallying locals against Oswald Mosley and signing up with reigning boss Darky Mulley (Geoff Bell) while Billy is on the fringes of a rival outfit run by hardnut Alf White (Jamie Foreman) and his softer son Harry (Justin Salinger).
#Gangland movie plot summary cracked
Rumley can climb into the minds of warped individuals, whether the clothes-obsessive of Fashionista or the cracked yachtsman of Fashionista, but here spreads his attention throughout a very large cast … still finding time for distinctive, unusual storytelling like the simple snapshot montage of everyone hearing the news on VE Day or a hospital visit (as Jack brings grapes to a lieutenant he’s unjustifiably duffed up) that ranks with Laurel and Hardy’s ‘hardboiled eggs and nuts’ sketch in terms of dramatic perfection.
Any pain they suffer – and both receive as many brutal beatings as they dish out – scarcely outweighs that they cause, and both have an interestingly squirmy screen presence, as if working hard on trying to be likeable but can’t keep it up and would rather punch you in the face to get what they want. Rumley’s chosen subjects, Jack ‘Spot’ Comer (Terry Stone) and Billy Hill (Leo Gregory) didn’t even have the decency to go down in a hail of bullets to provide iconic death scenes and some sense of retribution. Like most true-life gangster films, it has to deal with the thorny issue of making nuanced drama out of the lives and crimes of blokes spent decades working on their character arcs from nasty bastard to thoroughgoing cunt. Usually, the big reference is to Once Upon a Time in the West, but writer-director Simon Rumley looks to Leone’s later Once Upon a Time in America to craft an epic gangster drama that’s also a portrait of British social history and at once a celebration of East End-Soho-Aintree-Old Bailey mythology and a deconstruction of it. The Sergio Leone-esque ‘Once Upon a Time in …’ title format has been used so often on films like Robert Rodriguez’s OUATI Mexico, Shane Meadows’ OUATI the Midlands and Quentin Tarantino’s OUATI Hollywood that it risks getting worn out.
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